


Zona Rossa

by signsandsymbols



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Grief, Hating your dad and all dad-adjacent people in your life, James Baldwin - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Canon, Primo's origin story, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:20:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26841313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signsandsymbols/pseuds/signsandsymbols
Summary: Primo bought the pornographic magazine, and a dildo, from a sex shop in Rome, a twelve-hour round trip, then stood in front of his bed with both in his hands, feeling sick. In the end, he was too much of a coward to leave the dildo; if he did, Salvatore might actually kill him. The magazine would have to do.In which Primo comes out to his family, steals his mother’s ashes, and accidentally-on-purpose starts a turf war with the Naples mob.
Relationships: Leonardo/Primo Nizzuto, Leonardo/Regina (Trust)
Comments: 106
Kudos: 122





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for depictions of domestic violence and sex trafficking, and references to suicide, rape/sexual assault, and the Holocaust. Apologies, also, for any inaccuracies re: Italy, geographical or otherwise.

Certain nights in Primo’s childhood, when his parents were still alive, his father would skip dinner and come home late, self-satisfied, a smear of strange lipstick on his mustache. Primo’s mother would say something like, “You really care about our family so little that you would show our son this? You useless less-than-nothing. You fucking bitch.”

His father would fly into a rage, mostly, Primo thought, at being called a bitch by a woman who was supposed to always be afraid of him, and he would beat Primo’s mother savagely.

Sometimes Primo crawled into bed with her afterward, tucking himself under her stiff arm in a way that reminded him of the corpses of rabbits his father shot in the mountains and brought home to skin.

“Look at how cute,” his father would say to Primo, a knife poised to cut in his hand. “Do you want to pet them?”

Primo did not want to pet them.

“If you don’t say that to him, he won’t hurt you so much,” Primo told his mother one night. His father had punched his mother in the teeth, then returned to his girlfriend. Primo and his mother were alone in the house.

His mother laughed, and her split lip opened, blood blotting into the pillow they shared. It was late spring. He could hear the wind climbing and falling over the tiles on the roof, the trees raking their fronds over the walls of the house.

“If my only options are to cower, or to tell him what he is, then I know what I’m choosing every single goddamn time,” she said.

They looked like each other, he and his mother. He had her nose, her coffee allergy (it made her sneeze). She had his mole, on the opposite side of her face, a reflection. They both had fits of mania that kept them up all hours of the night. He would wake up just after 3 a.m. and find her in the kitchen, drawing women’s faces to music, over and over, the knob on the radio turned down to the lowest possible notch.

“You could leave,” he told her. The spots of blood on the pillowcase looked like a map of Slovenia, where her parents were from.

“And go where, baby? We’d starve to death.”

It felt good to be included in this fantasy of starving to death. If she went, he would go with her.

“The mountains,” he offered. “We could find an abandoned shepherd’s hut on a peak.”

She reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. “He would hunt us down,” she said. “He’d have the whole village looking for us,” and she smiled. The thought seemed to amuse her.

“So we would keep running,” he said. “We’d—we’d leave Italy.”

“You’d leave everything behind? You’d throw away the life your uncle laid out for you?” The smile was gone from his mother’s face, and she looked utterly solemn, but from the glint in her eye, he could tell she was joking.

But he wasn’t. “I would,” he told her. “We could—we could catch a plane to America.”

She had told him stories about America, the anonymous freedom between the skyscrapers of New York, the starlets on rocky beaches in California. She had been a flight attendant with Pan Am before becoming a mobster’s wife. She met his father on her twentieth birthday on a transatlantic jetliner over the Bermuda Triangle, but maybe that was only a story she liked to tell him.

He never understood why she married his father; being a flight attendant sounded much better. He would have liked to have been one.

“What will we do in America?” she asked. Her eyes were closed now, but from the tension in her face he could tell she was listening intently.

“We would memorize the entire Grand Canyon and become professional guides,” he said.

Eyes still closed, she grinned up at the ceiling, and he smiled at her, although she wouldn’t see. Sometimes it was very clear that she was bored of him, and sick of this life. When he could make her laugh, it felt like getting her to come back inside their family. She always seemed poised in open doorways, gazing out into the cold blue days, as if at any moment, she would run into the wilderness, screaming.

“We could have pet burros,” she said. The grin had made her lip worse, and a thin line of blood ran down the side of her face, toward her ear.

“Mama,” he said, and she cracked an eye open to look at him. He moved closer to her, toward the smell of her almond hand cream and the warmth of her body. “I’m serious. I won’t let him do this to you anymore.”

“You’re not letting him,” she said, scooting back, away from him, until she was at the far edge of the bed. “You’re not part of any of this. He’s just doing it. It’s like being caught in rainstorm: the clouds open up and then you’re wet, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He didn’t want to cry; he wanted to be angry, but he wasn’t. He lived with a consistent shadow of impatient fear, and it bloomed now in the center of his chest, a sickly flower.

She told him sometimes that he was too young to know anything, and all he wanted was to be old enough for that to stop. He wanted to learn how to take care of her, but suspected she would never let him.

Both of her parents had died in the war, and by the time she was his age, she was alone. His father liked to say that he had married her as a kindness. There was a clear implication that she was to spend the rest of her life paying him back for saving her.

Instead, she spat blood across the front of the clean white shirts she washed and ironed for him, and called him a bitch.

Primo loved her very much. He was 15 when she drowned herself in the Crati River, and when she was gone, his father didn’t know how to take care of himself. His clothes were perpetually wrinkled, and he couldn’t prepare even a simple meal. He was dead within a year, also a suicide, although that looked weak, so his uncle Salvatore told people it had been a heart attack.

People in their village blamed his mother for his father’s death. “That selfish cunt of a woman,” the baker said, “leaving behind the men in her life to fend for themselves.”

Salvatore came to collect Primo from the police station after Primo punched through the bakery’s picture window and covered every single loaf in broken glass.

Salvatore did much the same when he found the pornographic magazine on Primo’s bed. Primo had made his bed neatly, and left the magazine open on his pillow, to a black-and-white spread of one man giving another a blowjob.

The beating left Primo with one of his front teeth loose, and in the months following, he only ate soft foods, scrambled eggs and overcooked pasta, chewing with his back teeth, as the tooth reimplanted itself in the bone of his jaw.

Primo couldn’t explain his own internal logic for leaving the magazine on his bed, only that it felt necessary. It was 1962. He had lived with Salvatore for the three years after his father’s death, and in that time had only seen Salvatore beat his wife twice. Both times all Primo’s aunt had done was disagree with Salvatore. The second time, a week before Primo left the magazine on his bed, she called Salvatore foolish, and Salvatore hit her so hard that her glasses broke against her face.

She didn’t call Salvatore a bitch, only tipped her bruised face forward to catch the broken halves of the glasses in her hands. Then she quietly apologized to Salvatore, and left the room.

“These stupid fucking whores,” Salvatore said, then sat back down across from Primo at the table to eat the dinner she had prepared for them. He had begun to talk business with Primo over the past year and a half, and tonight discussed a new extortion scheme in the works.

Dinner was good. His aunt had prepared licurdia, chopping Tropea onions at the kitchen counter between two ornate taper candles, so that she wouldn’t cry. Primo grated potatoes, then pecorino, although she tutted at him when he began to help. Together, they stood in front of the stove as the soup simmered on the back burner, toasting slices of ciabatta bread and eating the scraps as they waited for Salvatore to arrive.

Primo’s aunt knew about Salvatore’s extortion scheme too, and how it mostly targeted local businesses, none of which had any real money, which was why she had called him foolish.

When his aunt left the kitchen, there was a trickle of blood between her eyes, where her glasses had cut into the bridge of her nose. Her soup sat cooling on the table, ciabatta disintegrating into nothing.

Salvatore followed Primo’s gaze and saw what he was looking at. “Go ahead,” he said.

“What?” Primo asked.

“Eat it,” Salvatore said, jovial. “You look hungry, and she doesn’t need it, anyway.”

“We could cover it with a plate,” Primo said. “For later.” There was a single vivid drop of blood on the table between them, the size of a flower bud.

“I said, eat it,” Salvatore said, and jerked the bowl across the table, in front of Primo. Soup sloshed over the edge of the bowl, onto the blood, which began to rise from the tablecloth into the liquid in a pink cloud, like ink.

Primo bought the pornographic magazine, and a dildo, from a sex shop in Rome, a twelve-hour round trip, then stood in front of his bed with both in his hands, feeling sick. In the end, he was too much of a coward to leave the dildo; if he did, Salvatore might actually kill him. The magazine would have to do.

In the photo spread Primo chose, both men were naked and muscular, with dense body hair. They were maybe five or six years older than Primo, and one knelt in front of the other, his mouth open to receive an enormous erection in a way that perversely reminded Primo of taking communion at church. The men were in someone’s apartment. There was an irregular afghan blanket thrown over the sofa behind them, and what looked like a family’s seaside vacation photos on the wall.

Salvatore beat Primo with his fists, then a walking stick, and Primo coughed blood all across the bedroom floor. He had already packed a bag; save for the magazine, the room was empty. Every earthly possession he had was in his car, where he planned live, on and off, in the coming months.

Because his mother was a suicide, and because she was Jewish, she wasn’t buried in the family cemetery. The columbarium was a two-hour drive away, and relatively easy to break into. Hundreds of urns sat on shelves up to the high ceiling, some behind glass, and it reminded him of a library. He found a ladder, climbed to her. There was an engraved cross beneath her name, and seeing it coiled fury hot and tight in his gut.

He put his mother’s urn in the passenger seat of his car, and drove northeast, toward the border, listening to The Beach Boys on the radio. The dried blood on his shirt felt like a chest plate, thin, useless armor. He felt insane, and pulled over outside of Naples to scream.

He hit the steering wheel with his hands and the horn blared out into the velvet darkness. His loose tooth throbbed tenderly in his mouth behind his swollen lips. He wanted to destroy himself.

He was on a narrow, winding road by Mount Vesuvius, car banked to the low stone wall. It was the middle of the night, and he could see the net of lights from the towns below, hugging the black water. It wasn’t steep enough to jump; he would only slide, and meet the ground in an injured heap.

He didn’t know anything about Judaism. His grandparents had hidden his sandy-haired mother in a Roman Catholic family just before the Nazi invasion and then had died in a concentration camp, but his mother never said which one. She had been like that, possessive about her own pain and refusing to share it. He understood; he was like that too.

He didn’t speak his mother’s first language, and didn’t know shit about Slovenia. Her entire side of the family was gone, and all of their neighbors too. He was the only one left.

He drove into Naples, found a bar, changed his clothing in the parking lot, then went inside and ordered a drink. The bartender, a middle-aged woman, seemed taken aback when Primo asked for directions to the nearest synagogue, but gave them.

“There’s a washroom,” she said after Primo finished writing the street address down, “if you want it.” She tipped her head in the direction of the hallway, then reached beneath the bar and came back up with a clean, folded towel. She set it in front of him, then added a little bar of soap. “Here,” she said.

Primo touched his face, and dried blood flaked onto his palm. “Okay,” he said, and for a moment was horrified by the prospect that he might cry, but didn’t. “Do you have a phone?”

She did.

He dialed, and waited for the line to connect.

Leonardo answered, voice muzzy on the phone, which made sense, because it was 2 a.m.

Primo said, “I’m in Naples.”

“Holy mother of God,” Leo said, sharpening into wakefulness. “What the fuck did you do, Primo? Salvatore’s been telling everyone you’re dead to him, but he won’t say why. What, did you fuck his wife?”

Not including the bartender, there were two other people in the bar, both prostitutes around Primo’s age, sitting together in a booth. One of them was reading while her friend slept, cheek pillowed by her arms. The woman who was reading had a livid outline of a large handprint bruised into her forearm.

The bartender thought he was like them, he realized, and touched his damaged face. He thought about the stories his mother had told him about New York, how freeing it was to walk around in a place where no one knew your name.

“No,” Primo said. “I’m gay. That’s what I did. I told him.”

He looked at the bartender, who was watching a small television, then at the women, who continued to read and sleep.

There was a long, heavy-seeming pause, then, “Why would you—why would you tell him that, though?” Leo asked. He didn’t sound disgusted or even angry; instead, he seemed to marvel at Primo’s choice, like a person might at a bad car accident, fascinated by the ruin.

“Because I fucking hate him,” Primo said.

“But you have nothing now,” Leo said. “You just threw away your whole life. What are you going to—are you staying in Naples, or—?”

Over the line there came a noise that was hard to place. Then it got louder and became clear: a baby was crying. Leo’s newborn son had woken up. The call went muffled as Leo put his hand over the receiver and spoke softly to Regina.

“Sorry,” Leo said, “but if you think I’m going to help you, Salvatore will kill me, and I’m not leaving Regina and Francesco alone.”

“I just wanted to talk to you,” Primo said, which sounded pathetic. He revised: “You knew my mother.”

They had been friends. Primo’s mother had been only five years older than Leo, and when he came over in one of her manic states, they played cards late into the evening. Sometimes Primo joined them, Leo teasing as he dealt him in.

Leo had kind eyes, a strong nose, and a square jaw. Primo had been unchangeably in love with him from the age of 13. He had called Leo only because he wanted to hear his voice.

“Salvatore broke my nose, I think,” Primo said.

“Serves you right,” Leo said. “I can’t believe you told him that, Jesus Christ. What are you going to do now? How are you going to feed yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Primo said, although he did. The woman who was reading turned a page in her book and squinted in the low light of the bar. “I was thinking of going to Slovenia.”

“What?” Leo said. “Why?”

“To give my mother a proper Jewish burial,” Primo said, and his voice broke.

“Sweetheart,” Leo began, and Primo missed the entire rest of the sentence, pinned to the spot by a single word.

Sweetheart, he thought, his whole body seeming to float one inch off the floor, two. No one had ever called him that before. He wanted Leo to speak it into his ear again, to murmur it, close and hot, against his skin.

“Primo?” came Leo’s voice.

He tried to recover. “What did you say?”

“I said, your mother would have wanted you to be safe. And since she’s not here, I’ll tell you now: you need to figure out how to take care of yourself.”

“I know that,” he said, irritated.

“You don’t,” Leo said. “You know how to get angry and rip yourself up into little pieces and make everything around you hell, but you don’t know how to be good to yourself.”

Leo could have told him to do anything after calling him sweetheart, and he would have listened. Maybe it was an intrinsic weakness in his moral character. Maybe that was why Salvatore had hit him so hard.

He wanted Leo to keep speaking. “How do I do that?” he asked. “How can I be good to myself?”

“How much money do you have on you right now?” Leo asked.

When Primo told him, Leo swore. Staticky silence ticked between them. Primo listened to the faint sound of Leo’s breath miles away in their village in Calabria. He wondered what Leo’s fingers would feel like, opening him.

One of the best things about you is what you don’t know about me, he thought.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Leo said after a minute. “You’re going to sleep in your car tonight—someplace safe, make sure—with your doors locked, and then you’re going to buy yourself breakfast and a newspaper tomorrow. Eat and look through the classifieds. Call people about jobs. I’ll, fuck, I’ll wire you some money, okay? It won’t be a lot,” he warned, “but you won’t starve.”

“I don’t need your money,” Primo said.

“Tough shit,” Leo said. “Tell me where I should send it.”


	2. Chapter 2

There was a full shower in the bar’s washroom, not a speck of mildew in the grout. Primo turned the water on and stood in the steam, gingerly brushing his teeth with his finger.

Water ran pink down the drain, the mirror opaque with condensation. In it, he was only shape and skin. His face felt raw, and his back hurt from Salvatore’s walking stick.

Recently Salvatore had begun to invite the police chief, his wife, and their daughter Evelina over for dinner once a week. Evelina had been in school with Primo, liked the Beatles, and had a handsome older brother, Domenico. Domenico had been blinded in a motorcycle accident, and now spent his days helping Evelina’s mother, a potter, sculpting clay into bowls by touch.

Primo and Evelina sat next to each other at the dinner table, her parents and Salvatore smiling at them both encouragingly. The heavy rope of Evelina’s braid rested on her shoulder. She had a dimpled chin. Being attracted to her was like trying to strike a match underwater.

Salvatore had given Primo one of his nice suits to wear, although the trousers were too short by six inches (“Just sit down as much as possible,” Salvatore advised). Primo’s aunt, her glasses taped together, had done Primo’s cufflinks for him, and they shone in his sleeves, tiny gold points of light.

Evelina was telling a story about herself and Domenico as children, how they liked to play fairies in the hills, and pretend the pebbles were gemstones.

“Not Domenico, though,” the police chief cut in. He was the same one who had arrested Primo for smashing the baker’s window. “Domenico liked to play a soldier. He’d find big rocks,” here, the police chief made a fist to demonstrate, “and pretend they were grenades, and throw them at stray dogs.”

Primo looked at Evelina, and saw in her face that none of her father’s story was true. He knew, also, that Domenico hadn’t really been in a motorcycle accident. Like Primo’s father’s fake heart attack, that was only a story the villagers pretended to believe to be polite. What actually happened was that the police chief had found Domenico with Gian, the butcher’s apprentice, and had thrown boiling water in his son’s face, blinding him.

A record was playing, but Primo’s pulse in his ears made it impossible to hear the lyrics. You took your son’s eyes, he thought, yet somehow we’ve all agreed to watch over your shitty little feelings.

Francesco’s baptism was the next day, and Leo had been furious when he found Primo behind the church, listening to the service through an open window and smoking.

“Are you coming in or not?” Leo asked. “They’re already past the celebration of the sacrament.”

It was a hot summer day, and even in the shade, sweat beaded on Leo’s face, and circled the underarms of his shirt. The humidity had freed Leo’s dark curls from his hair cream, and some fell across his forehead. He looked extremely handsome. Primo wanted to lick his neck, just to see what Leo would do. He liked that Leo had noticed he was missing, and had come outside to find him.

“Primo,” Leo said, anger in his voice. “Come on. We’re going inside.”

Primo looked up at him from where he lay in the grass. “So leave already,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

Leo sat down next to him, accepted the cigarette Primo held out, and took a drag.

“This is an important day for Regina,” he said.

“And for you,” Primo said, rolling onto his side to see Leo better. He thought of Domenico’s ruined eyes, and felt abruptly nauseous. Leo wouldn’t do that to Francesco. Primo needed very badly to believe that.

“Of course for me,” Leo said, and looked down at him, curious. “Now get up.”

“Salvatore wants me to marry Evelina,” Primo said, watching a firebug, the red-and-black mask of its back, climb over Leo’s knee. He wanted to trace its path with his finger.

“But you don’t.”

The cigarette filter touched the center of Primo’s palm, and his hand spasmed before he could control himself. He took the cigarette back from Leo. “No,” he said.

“She’s a pretty girl,” Leo said.

“When I imagine our wedding night,” Primo said, watching Leo’s face, “I think it would be like fucking an animal.”

“Christ,” Leo said, his expression curdling. “What a horrible thing to say.”

“It feels unnatural, is what I mean.” He considered feeling guilty, but anger cancelled out any remorse. Evelina got to plan a nice life for herself while Domenico rotted indoors without eyes.

“She has less of a choice than you do, you know,” Leo said, and took the cigarette back again, a small punishment. “What her life looks like is down to what her father wants. So stop being such a shithead about it.”

He reached down and lightly slapped Primo’s cheek, really just a tap of fingers. Primo could still feel it when he followed Leo back inside the church, where they discovered they had completely missed the baptism.

Primo recalled that summer day when Salvatore found the magazine on his bed. Salvatore began to shake, and not even in anger. When he looked up from the photo spread and met Primo’s eyes, he seemed afraid.

No one had ever been afraid of Primo like that before. It felt good.

He dried his hair and redressed in his clothes, and when he came back out into the main room again, the bar was filled with dozens of prostitutes, setting up cots. Some of them were already asleep, hair spilling over the edge of their beds, makeup unwashed from their exhausted faces. Some of them were very young, just little girls.

The room smelled like perfume, talcum powder, and dirty sweat. He was the only man.

The bartender was eating pasta e fagioli at the bar. He walked over to her, and she slid a plate toward him.

“Here,” she said. “I don’t like to presume, but you look like you’ve had an absolute bitch of a day.”

“Thank you,” he said, and began to eat, mindful of his front tooth.

Some of the women chatted amongst themselves, laughing quietly, but the bar was largely quiet. A few women snored, and one called out to her mother in her sleep. The women still awake watched Primo with suspicion, and he dropped his eyes back to his food, surprised by the wave of shame he felt. Sometimes his mother, after his father had beaten her, didn’t like to be touched or even looked at. Whoever these women were, he could give them that, at least.

“I’m not a madame,” the bartender said, “before you ask.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said, although he had been thinking exactly that. “What is this place?”

“A bedroom,” the bartender said, “in the nighttime, at least. And a diner. My wife is a cook.”—He looked up at her, shocked.—"What do you think of the meal?”

“It’s good,” he said, and rolled a cannellini bean across the back of his fork. It _was_ good, garlicky and filling, with a rich stock. “You do this every night?”

“They have to have someplace to go,” the bartender said. “They work less this way.”

“But they still work,” he said.

There was a girl sleeping near the bar, no older than 12. Her face was still round with baby fat.

“Not all of them,” the bartender said, and she looked at the girl too. “Not her, or any of the little ones. They’re the ones we get out first.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.

“My wife and I. I used to be like them too. Oh, don’t look so startled,” she said, and made a face at him. “I didn’t used to have all this gray hair. I met my wife when she offered me a place to stay one night, and she helped me get out. And now we help these girls escape too.”

From the Camorra, she meant. The Naples mob.

“I’m not like them,” he said. “I don’t need help.”

“I’m not offering any,” she said coolly, and took another bite of her dinner. “Only we need a new bodyguard, if you’re interested.”

“What happened to the old one?” he asked.

She raised her eyebrows at him, like he was stupid, then said, “I can see how you don’t look at them. The directions I gave you before were to my wife’s synagogue. When you asked, that was when I decided to trust you.”

“Where do the girls go,” he asked, “when they escape?”

“A lot of places,” she said, and he could tell that, even if she trusted him like she claimed, she was being purposefully vague. “Some go back their families, if they’re far away enough for it to be safe. Others go to schools in the countryside. A few go abroad, if they have family to meet them on the other side. The pay is shit,” she said, and looked at him. “But I can offer you a stipend, room, and board.”

There was nowhere else in the world where Primo was wanted, and Leo had told him to get a job. He stuck out his hand.

The bartender shook it, and introduced herself as Zeta.


	3. Chapter 3

When Primo returned to Calabria from the sex shop just after 10 p.m., his aunt was waiting in the yard outside, smoking one of Salvatore’s cigars on a collapsible lawn chair. She had set one up for him too, and patted its metal arm. He joined her.

“You’re almost 20,” she said, blue smoke spilling upward from her mouth, “and I can’t control what you do anymore, but I was worried about you anyway. Where were you?”

“On the Moon,” he said, a placeholder as he thought of a real excuse. “I went to see a friend.”

She turned to him with obvious interest, wreathed in a crown of smoke. The night was matted with clouds, and made it hard to see the bruises on her face. “A girl?” she asked. There was so much hope on the surface of her voice.

“Yes,” he said. The cashier at the sex shop, a woman who sort of resembled his aunt, had been the one to direct him to the pornographic magazines.

“You should bring her to dinner,” his aunt said. “I’d like to meet this girl of yours. What’s she like?”

The clouds met the mountains in the distance and moved slowly, ripping their underbellies open on the peaks. “She has glasses like you,” Primo decided. “Dark, curly hair, and nice eyes,” but he was beginning to describe Leo, and stopped himself. “We had coffee once. It felt good to be together.” He meant Leo again.

He waited for his aunt to ask for a name, and when she didn’t, he knew that she knew he was lying.

“I’ll invite her over sometime,” he promised, pressing a little more solidity into the lie on principle. “You’d like her.”

She puffed on her cigar. “Would Salvatore?”

They were playing a game of pretend with each other, Primo realized, like he used to do with his mother. All he needed now was a good story, and to speak carefully around the fact that he was imagining Leo and not a woman.

“Salvatore would be out of his mind,” he said, which was true. He went on telling the truth, “We’ve known each other for a long time, since I was a kid. Mostly we just talk, but it always feels good, even when we fight.” He hesitated. “Safe,” he said. “I feel safe, being with this person.”

Clouds thickened over the moon, and the night went darker. All he could see of his aunt was the ember of her cigar.

“Salvatore used to make me feel safe,” she said, and Primo went cold.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “It won’t be.”

“I’m not an idiot, Primo,” she said. “I may not fight like your mother did, but I do what I need to keep myself alive.”

Fury rose in the back of his throat. “She did everything she could too,” he spat. It felt ridiculous to have this conversation in a lawn chair. “You have no idea what it was like, watching him hit her.”

But of course she knew exactly what it was like, more than he ever could.

“You weren’t there,” he said instead. “She did what she had to do to escape.”

“She left you,” his aunt told him, like he needed reminding. When his mother had disappeared in the middle of the night, the whole town got out of bed and searched for her. Primo had fallen in the middle of the street when it was announced that her body had been found.

“You never thought about it?” he asked. “Leaving like she did?”

“Who would take care of you?” she said.

Primo thought of his father, his stained shirts, food unwashed and burnt to the bottom of pans. In the months following his mother’s death, Primo taught himself how to cook, and did his and his father’s laundry with the housewives of the village, who regarded Primo with pity. He didn’t care. To be helpless, to not know how to take care of himself when alone, seemed like a nightmare.

“He’s terrible to you,” Primo said instead. “The things he says, I couldn’t stand it.”

“Money’s tight, and your uncle’s under a lot of stress,” she said. “Unless you live with it, you don’t know whether you can stand it or not. Most people can endure much more than they realize.”

“But should they have to?” He meant, Should you?

“There are certain things that will kill you,” she said. “Hunger and thirst, cooking fires. God, if He wants to. But there are many more things that merely wound. And most wounds heal, whether you want them to or not.”

“What if there are too many wounds, and they drive you insane?” he asked.

“Then after a while, you don’t realize you’re in pain anymore,” she said, “if you go crazy. You just become an animal.”

All of Primo’s muscles seized up with the desire to break something. He wanted to throw the lawn chair across the yard and let the blackness swallow it. He wanted to scream and rip everyone sleeping in nearby houses from their dreams. Instead, he gripped the lawn chair’s arms, and kept himself still.

“Animals hurt too,” he said.

“But it doesn’t matter as much,” she told him.

“My mother mattered,” he said. His aunt drew a sharp breath in surprise; Primo had just broken the rules of their game. He could no longer let himself pretend. “I loved her,” he said, “and she deserved none of what happened to her. It wasn’t her fault.”

“It’ll be different when you have a wife,” his aunt said.

She didn’t trust him at all. Primo was his father’s son, his uncle’s successor. A future had been laid like a building scaffold across his life. A legacy to inherit. A wife to love or injure, children for this wife to raise, for Primo to frighten.

“I’m never getting married,” he told her. Before she could reply, he quickly added, “You know why.” He could only imply it; it was too much truth otherwise.

“You never know,” she said, but he did. He knew his own mind and desires exactly, the whirlpools of fear and ugliness, and how Leo looked when he smiled.

“I won’t,” he said, and together they folded the lawn chairs, leaned them against the house, and went inside to sleep.

//

The day after Primo’s mother was pulled lifeless from the Crati River, he went to see Leo, and collapsed on his doorstep.

Leo carried Primo inside, ground coffee beans, and set a percolator on the stove. When the percolator bubbled up, Leo poured them each a cup, and gently set Primo’s on a saucer by his face, where it rested on the kitchen table.

Primo had gone to bed crying the night before and had woken up crying too. In the morning sunlight, he had been confused by his own tears, but then remembered his mother was gone.

Leo took a sip of his coffee. Primo crawled halfway into Leo’s lap.

“Primo,” Leo said, “get up.”

Primo didn’t move or respond. Leo’s hand came down on Primo’s spine, and began to stroke slowly, up and down. All Primo could feel was the motion of Leo’s hand. The rest of him felt nerveless, wrung out. Primo made a sound in the back of his throat, and porcelain clinked as Leo set his coffee down. His other hand came to rest in Primo’s hair.

She had been alive two mornings ago, eating a pear by the window and watching the neighbors’ laundry dry in the springtime breeze. When Primo said he loved her, she kissed him square between the eyes, her lips sticky with pear juice. The moment felt so near it seemed impossible that he couldn’t return to it.

The hand in Primo’s hair began tracing the shell of his ear, delicately dipping into the cartilage. He looked up at Leo, who seemed embarrassed, his thigh flexing beneath Primo’s cheek.

“When I was upset as a child, my mother used to rub my ears,” Leo said, and blushed.

“It feels good,” Primo said, shut his eyes again, and let him. Leo’s hand moved steadily from the small of Primo’s back to the nape of his neck. He massaged Primo’s earlobe between two fingertips, and the sound of their skin meeting was all Primo could hear.

Primo’s face was turned into Leo’s stomach, the buttons of his shirt brushing the tip of Primo’s nose. He could feel, against his cheek, that Leo was getting hard, and the knowledge throbbed through him. He shifted slightly, then pressed his open mouth to Leo.

Leo jerked beneath him, then grabbed Primo by the shoulders and hauled him up. It was disorienting, to move in the space of a second from being soothed in a lap back to uprightness, and he didn’t know what to do.

“You’re 15,” Leo said, “and I’m married. And—and that’s just something that happens to me sometimes. Like with the news yesterday, or when Regina’s father passed away.”

“You get sympathy hard-ons?” Primo asked, honestly curious. He had never seen Leo ashamed before. The blush extended down beneath his collar.

“When I get emotional,” Leo said, and his cup clattered jaggedly against the saucer when he reached for his coffee again. “It’s not you,” he said, “it’s the story. Please let’s not talk about this anymore.”

Leo had prepared Primo’s coffee like how Primo’s mother took it: heated milk, no sugar. Primo took a sip, and sneezed.

“What other times has it happened?” he asked, and looked down at Leo’s trousers, where the fabric still strained. He wanted to climb on top of him and feel it between his legs.

“Shut up,” Leo said. “Have you eaten breakfast yet?” And he fixed Primo bread with butter and jam.

//

“I got a job,” Primo told Leo over Zeta’s phone, studying the gun in his hand. “And a room too.”

He had slept in the bar’s attic loft last night, away from the women, on a mattress between cartons of wine bottles. In the morning, when he came downstairs, the older women were gone, and the little girls sat making paper dolls on the floor while Zeta’s wife, Liliana, drank espresso and poured them all hot chocolate and bowls of muesli.

“You’re fast,” Leo said. He sounded relieved, and genuinely pleased for him. “That’s great, that’s wonderful. Where are you working?”

“At a bar,” Primo told him.

“You’re a bartender,” Leo said.

Primo didn’t correct him. “How are Regina and Francesco?” he asked.

“Healthy and happy,” Leo said. “It’s Regina’s sister’s birthday next week, and we’re going to take Francesco up to meet his cousins for the first time.”

One of the little girls, whose name was Greta, came over to Primo, and laid a paper doll across his knee. He looked up at her.

“Her name is also Primo,” Greta said. There was a chocolate mustache on her upper lip. She had drawn the doll’s face carefully in ballpoint pen, and the paper Primo gazed up at the human Primo with enormous blue eyes.

“She’s very beautiful,” Primo said, “thank you.”

“Who’s that?” Leo said over the phone.

“What?” Primo said.

“Who are you talking to?” Leo asked. “It sounded like a child.”

“You must have misheard,” Primo said. “The connection must be bad or something.”

Greta returned to her friends. Primo didn’t know anything about her or the rest of them. He didn’t know where their parents were, if they were worried about their missing daughters.

He wanted to go back in time, find his own mother at Greta’s age, and raise her himself. They would get out of Italy, go somewhere entirely new, and rely on no one but themselves.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A warning for this chapter in particular: a character discusses her past experience with rape. It’s not done graphically, but please be aware.

In the mid-mornings to the early afternoons, after their husbands left for work but before they returned for lunch, the women of Naples came with food. At least a dozen showed up every day, teenage girls to grandmothers, young mothers and widows. They brought warm loaves of bread, red and yellow peppers, soft homemade cheese, tomato preserves, dried beans, potatoes, meat wrapped in wax paper, and bottles of vinegar.

Primo stood with Zeta and Liliana to meet the women in the alley behind the bar, next to a heavy wooden door with a smiling picture of Medusa carved into it.

Most of the women ignored Primo—Zeta and Liliana had explained he was their new bodyguard—but some considered him with interest. Signora Accardi, who wore a black lace mourning veil and had three prominent gold teeth, grew apricots and zucchini in her garden and often came by to drop them off. She liked to tease him, and was, at least, eighty years old.

Today she winked at Primo as she handed him a paper bag of produce, then said to Zeta and Liliana, “Your new one’s cute.”

Zeta, smoking, rolled her eyes. Liliana, with her men’s suit and pompadour, stifled a laugh.

“I really wouldn’t know,” Liliana said, then nodded to Primo. “Go on, bring those downstairs.”

He did. There was a hidden passageway through the hallway floor that led to a second cellar where Zeta and Liliana maintained a food pantry. Once the women outside were finished dropping off the food, others came by, and picked it up to feed their families.

He knelt, pressed the hidden springs in the floorboards, and the floor opened to the laughter of little girls. Greta and her friends did exaggerated impressions of each other in high-pitched voices as they sorted food onto shelves, and yelled Primo’s name as he climbed down the ladder.

“Apricots and zucchini,” he said, “from Signora Accardi.”

“Zucchini and apricots,” Greta’s friend Teodora announced in a gravely impression of his voice, “from Signora Accardi,” and bowed low to receive the bag.

Teodora was rail-skinny, with a ropy scar that ran from her chin to just under her nose. Liliana arrived at breakfast with Teodora under her arm just two days after Primo had shown up last month. Liliana had looked grim, with someone else’s blood on her collar. Teodora wouldn’t even look at Primo at first, numbly turning to the wall when he poured them cups of coffee, and offered her one.

“Grown in the finest Vesuvian gardens,” he said now, and matched Teodora’s bow, to delighted shrieks of laughter.

He had never been around children before. He had grown up an only child, and the closest thing he had to a sibling was a second cousin somewhere in Rome.

Francesco was still under a year old. The first and only time Primo held him, careful to support his neck as Regina advised, it was like holding a very breakable exotic animal. Looking down at Francesco in his arms, all Primo felt was a dry, cold jealousy, like he was watching himself from another room.

Francesco didn’t look like either of his parents yet, but they loved him anyway. Primo handed Francesco back to Regina, and when Leo tried to invite him to stay for dinner, Primo declined, and spent the rest of the evening walking along the Crati River. Sometimes, when the last sunlight hit the water, he thought he saw her, swimming.

He went back upstairs, and found Zeta and Liliana kneeling to pet an old gray cat named Grace Kelly, who twined around their ankles. Zeta balanced a tray of olive-studded focaccia in the air, out of Grace Kelly’s reach. Liliana stroked the cat’s ears, then leaned to kiss Zeta’s temple. Watching them, he felt taut with a terrible longing, although he couldn’t say for what.

Sometimes they showed up in the middle of the night with children they had stolen away from the Camorra. These children, like Greta and Teodora downstairs, ran after each other through the bar’s rooms and hallways, falling over themselves with laughter, and helped other women set up cots at night to sleep. Zeta gave them toothbrushes and shampoo, and had converted the office in the back of the bar into a classroom, where the girls had lessons during the day until they got out of Naples. Liliana taught them how to play and cheat at cards, and brought home cardboard boxes of secondhand paperback novels for the girls and women to read.

The last time Liliana brought a box of books back, she pulled Primo aside after dinner and handed him a copy of _Giovanni’s Room_ , by James Baldwin. He had stayed up all night reading it, filled with same, keen hunger he felt now. He had never seen a character like himself before, and reading in the attic loft that night he thought he finally understood how church was supposed to make you feel: illuminated by something that knew all of you.

There was a passage of Baldwin’s that, the first time he read it, seemed to crack his breastbone in two: “I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

He set the book down on the pillow next to him, and his entire body began to shake. He had not looked at loneliness in the face like this since that spring morning four years ago in Leo’s kitchen, and it spread through him like a fever. He didn’t know how to calm down and so just waited for it to pass, shivering, taking small sips of air as his heart pounded. When the panic stopped, he read on.

“Primo!” Zeta said, spotting him. “This should be the last of it for today. Come eat before you and Lili go out.”

The two women straightened up, handed Primo the focaccia, then brushed cat fur off each other’s clothing. Zeta wore bifocals, a dress patterned with red flowers, and a shell clip in her hair, which Liliana carefully set back into place. They were both sweet-faced women in their late 40s who called each other wives, and were quick to laugh, although Liliana was quicker. You would never look at them and guess they had killed at least fifty men.

//

Their organization didn’t have a name, because, without one, it was harder to get caught. The Camorra ran Naples, but there were gaps, Zeta told Primo as they washed the dishes together after dinner one night. Places that men didn’t care about, or want to own. Women’s spaces: elementary school classrooms, sewing circles, home kitchens. Convents, sometimes, if the nuns were elderly enough.

It was from these unremarkable spaces that the girls Zeta and Lililana stole from the Camorra were educated, clothed, and fed. Retired teachers came in for a drink and taught classes. Nurses arrived with medicine, treated wounds, and provided abortions. Secretaries forged new identity documents and paperwork. A solid third of the women of Naples were involved, although their fathers, husbands, and brothers would never know it.

The problem was money, Zeta told Primo, handing him a salad bowl to dry. Most of the women of Naples did not control their own money, and most of the girls and women Zeta and Liliana helped escape had been pulled into the Camorra in the first place due to poverty. To stay out, to stay safe, they needed money.

Zeta and Liliana had figured out a way around this. They knew where the money of Naples was, and how to get it.

“So you kill and rob the johns,” Primo said, weighing the idea in his mind as he put the salad bowl away and accepted a series of drinking glasses. “That’s it? You’re not worried they’ll get scared and stop seeing the women? You’re not worried you’ll get caught?”

“Unfortunately, it’s been years since we began,” Zeta replied. “When the deaths come out, if they do, people assume it’s the Camorra, and don’t say anything, because they’re too frightened of them, so we can keep going. Most men don’t think to be scared of women at all, you know. And if they _did_ get scared, and stopped going after our girls, we wouldn’t need the money in the first place.”

“So you’re a mob,” Primo said.

Zeta laughed. “Those are for men,” she said, and started on the silverware. “We’re a family.”

“Mobsters say that too,” he said.

She shrugged. “Most men don’t know how to take care of a family. They don’t know how to strip a bed when a child is sick, or change a diaper, or bathe a dying parent. They don’t know how to love someone without taking them over.”

“But you are,” he said, “aren’t you? You’re taking these men over too. You’re not just taking their money; you’re taking their lives.”

“We wouldn’t hurt them if they didn’t hurt us first,” Zeta said, and turned off the water.

The dishes were done. The sink drained slowly. Zeta reached into the soapy water and came back up with a handful of debris from the drain, threw it away, then washed her hands.

Through the wall, Primo could hear women talking as they played cards before bed. There were children’s voices too. Someone was singing along to the radio. He didn’t know what to say. The sink gurgled as it drained.

“Have you ever been raped, Primo?” Zeta asked.

He whipped around to look at her. She might have slapped him; it was a humiliating question to even be asked.

“Of course not,” he said. “Of course I haven’t been—”

“Because you’re ignorant of the experience, I’ll describe it to you,” she said, a threat, then did: “I was 14. My parents were gone, and I lived with my grandmother and her seeing-eye dog. We were so fucking broke we couldn’t afford dog food, so I went out one night. It was such an easy way to make money. I did it again and again, first because we had to eat, and then because other men made me. You know what I thought about, when it was happening?”

She crossed her arms and waited for his answer, her hip cocked against the sink.

He didn’t say anything.

“Primo,” she said, her voice hard, “answer me.”

“I don’t know,” he said to the empty sink. “I don’t know what you thought about.”

“I thought, I’m only here so these men can give each other money. The ones making me do this, and the ones buying me. My grandmother and I had no food in the house, and instead of giving us some of their money so that we could eat, those men paid to sell and rape a teenage girl. I’m done letting that happen.” She looked up at him, her eyes shining and fierce. “I’ve been done. We need money, they have money, we take that money without trading ourselves for it. If they want to be selfish, fuck ‘em. We get everyone out who we can, and if anyone tries to get in the way, well,” she said, and smiled at him thinly. “We don’t let them.”

//

When Leo told Primo that Regina was expecting a child, Primo felt a betrayal so acute it stunned him. They sat across from each other at a little cafe by the river’s edge, sharing a bottle of expensive red wine that Leo had paid for, and watching the sunset. Primo had turned 18 the week before, and had now been in love with Leo for just under five years.

Primo wanted to scream. He leaned forward slightly in his chair, curving around the fist that had just formed somewhere inside his chest, then raised his glass.

“Cheers,” he said, and made himself smile. A strange tremor began in his wrist as he waited for Leo to clink his glass, and it quickly worsened, wine spilling over and staining the tablecloth. Primo set his glass down again, and began to knead his fingers into his wrist, trying to steady it.

“Are you all right?” Leo asked, looking at him, and mopped his napkin into the mess. “We wanted to ask you to be the baby’s godfather. You’re like family to me, Primo, and it would mean so much to Regina and me if—”

“Yes,” Primo said, “yes, I’ll do it. I’m happy for you both. Congratulations.” The shaking had stopped. He drank more wine.

“You look like you’re about to cry,” Leo said softly.

“Fuck you,” Primo said, “I’m not. This is what I look like when I’m happy. You’ve just never seen me this happy before.”

He turned to the river and watched it. Tangerine-colored sunlight rolled and broke across small waves. He didn’t know the exact spot his mother had gone in, but it was a game he played with himself sometimes, imagining. Here, he would think, walking along the bank. No, here. This is where I would do it.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I thought it would upset you,” Leo said. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”

Primo had read somewhere that the first breath of water a drowning person took felt good, a relief. He didn’t know if it was true, but believed in it anyway.

“Are you excited?” he asked Leo, and turned back to him. “If you have son, are you going to name him after yourself?”

“We've always wanted children,” Leo said, then made a face at the second part of the question, “and no. Regina had a twin, did you know that? Her brother died of polio when they were children. If we have a son, he’ll be Francesco, after him.”

“What about a daughter?” Primo asked, swiveling the stem of his wine glass between his fingers.

Leo hesitated. “We were thinking Tjaša,” he said, “after your mother.”

Primo got up and left. The reaction was purely automatic. His metal chair scraped soundlessly over the rough stone floor, and Leo said something, but the words seemed to pile on the table in front of him. As Primo walked through the cafe, the other diners stared at him, then back at Leo, who might have been calling his name.

“I don’t understand,” Leo called, panting, when he finally caught up with Primo, now over a mile away. Leo was red-faced from running, and paced along the shore. “Primo, get out and come talk to me, please.”

Primo looked back at him from the water. He had rolled his trousers up and waded in up to his knees. The current was sluggish here, the silt soft and silken, sucking him deeper. He shifted his stance to face Leo, and something metal caught and snagged in the sole of his foot. When he lifted his foot from the water, the skin ran red. He had stepped on a fishhook.

“Fucking hell,” Leo said, and sloshed into the water after him, shoes and all. “You run off in the middle of our conversation, and now you—get out of the water, Primo. We’re supposed to be drinking wine and celebrating right now, not—not whatever this is, Jesus.”

The sun had set, and the surface of the river was wild with stars. Right here, Primo thought. This is where I would do it.

“I’m fine,” he said, when Leo reached him.

“You’re hurt,” Leo countered. “When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

He couldn’t remember. “Last year,” he said.

“You lie all the fucking time,” Leo sighed, then put Primo’s arm over his shoulder, to better support his weight. “Come on, we’re done swimming for the night. I wear these fucking shoes to church, and now—,” he broke off, and began to walk slowly toward shore, as Primo hopped along next to him. He wanted to laugh, or wrestle himself away from Leo and rush back into the water until it took him. He did neither.

They got to shore. Leo eased Primo down into the sand, then took his injured foot in his lap and hissed at the sight.

“Why did you do this to yourself?” Leo asked, and touched the fishhook with his fingertip. He was gentle, but the nerves screamed up past Primo’s knee, and his foot kicked out involuntarily. “Sorry,” Leo said, and put a hand on Primo’s ankle. “It’s just that I don’t know how we can get you back to town if we don’t take this out. It’s not in there that deep,” he said. “I can just—”

“You’re hurting me,” Primo said.

Leo looked up at him. “Shut up, Primo,” he said, and took the fishhook out. It was one clean motion, then it was over. Leo’s hands, knee, and the sand around them went dark red. Leo folded one of Primo’s socks into a pad against the sole of his foot, put the other sock on over it, then slipped his shoe on, and tied it tight.

“I can do it myself,” Primo said.

Leo ignored him, and put the other shoe on Primo’s bare foot. “Come on,” he said, and helped him up. “We have an hour before the doctor closes for the evening, and you need that cleaned out. And you need a tetanus shot. Don’t argue with me,” he said, as Primo opened his mouth to do exactly that.

As they walked away from the river, back toward the village, Primo said, “If I was a woman, and you weren’t married, do you think you would ever, that you could—that you could feel about me like you do for Regina?”

They had reached an unlit bridge. The river was stronger here, water rushing beneath them. Primo’s shoe was filled with blood, and left odd half-footprints behind them as it seeped out. Primo’s arm was still over Leo’s shoulder, and Leo’s arm was around Primo’s waist, but they had both stopped walking. In the early summer moonlight, Leo was beautiful.

“What I tell you won’t matter,” Leo said into the nighttime, “because those are all hypotheticals. None of that is true.”

“But if it was,” Primo said. “Pretend like it’s true and tell me. I’ll—I’ll become the baby’s godfather if you tell me. But only then.”

“If I wasn’t married, and you were a woman,” Leo said, “could I love you like I do Regina? Is that what you’re asking?” He waited for Primo to nod, then continued, “That’s all you want? The truth?”

“That’s all,” Primo told him.

“I could,” Leo said. “Very easily.”


	5. Chapter 5

_Dear Primo_ , Leo’s letter began.

 _It’s been three months since you last called, so I’m writing to the address you left before. I don’t know if you’re still staying there, but_ (here, the words had been scribbled over) _I wanted to see how you were._

_Chiara left Salvatore, did you know that? Everyone’s talking about it, although not around Salvatore, of course. Rumor has it that she followed her sister to the United States, to the Bronx._

_The last time I saw your aunt was the day before she left. I came by to meet Salvatore, and she answered the door with a smile like I’d never seen before, and I’ve worked for Salvatore since I was 17. Salvatore wasn’t back yet, but she invited me in, and all we did was not talk about you._

_The whole village is pretending you and Chiara are dead, but I_ (most of the next line was scratched out) _know that’s not true. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I picture Chiara in New York, probably inaccurately, because Regina and I just went to see_ West Side Story _, and you_ (here, two sentences had been crossed out) _happy, at least. I hope you’re happy, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing._

_It’s hard to see you as a bartender, taking orders, pouring drinks. You used to tell me you wanted to be a flight attendant like your mother, remember? Only I don’t think she liked it so much, either. The travel, yes, the passengers, no._

_Did she ever tell you about the time she knocked someone unconscious? A man was drunk and kept yelling “Waitress!” at her, trying to get her to refill his drink, and she got so sick of him she pretended to adjust the luggage compartment above his seat and dropped a suitcase on his head. When he woke up, all she offered him was a band-aid. Every time she told that story, she laughed and laughed._

_Francesco has started talking, and wakes us up in the middle of the night sometimes, calling for us. In fact, it’s because of him that I’m writing to you now. Sunrise isn’t for another hour._

_Lately I’ve been thinking about the night you came over for dinner with a black eye. You’d just moved in with Salvatore. You wouldn’t tell me or Regina what happened, although we could guess._

_Regina had a pot of sauce on the stove, and kept feeding you bites of it, asking what was missing from the seasoning, to try to get you to talk. I never told you this, but the sauce was already done. We’d finished making dinner just before you came over, but every time she asked, you said something else. More garlic, so we added it. Chili flakes, you said. We put those in too. A splash of wine, a cinnamon stick. All of it, we put in, just to hear you speak. Every time she asked you to taste it, I saw you get angrier, but you answered anyway, and it was better than silence._

_Whenever we cook the sauce now, we still make it that way, with your additions. Which is to say: my wife is and will always be braver than I am. Regina is the one who drove Chiara to the airport._

_Let me know you’re okay, please._

_Yours,_

_Leonardo_

Primo leaned against the hood of the car, rereading the letter by moonlight as Liliana retrieved the shovel from the trunk. Leo had posted the letter a week ago, although it was also the middle of the night now.

A john’s corpse lay a short distance away in the shadow of a condemned house built into the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Hundreds of thousands of homes like this had been illegally built around the base of the volcano, most of them by mob-run companies, and the construction was uniformly shoddy. The higher up the mountain you went, the worse the houses got, until at a certain altitude they all seemed to sag inward, threatening to collapse at any moment. Even squatters avoided them. Some houses, like this one, had been left half-finished, just a hollow frame over a cellar.

It was a near-perfect place to hide bodies. The Camorra dug the graves for us, Liliana liked to say.

Primo folded the letter back into his pocket, removed a lantern and a collapsible stretcher from the backseat, and followed Liliana. Together, they heaved the corpse onto the stretcher, piled the shovel and lantern on top, then crept into the house, which smelled like an odd combination of mildew and sawdust. The cellar steps were just earth, and tricky to go down with the weight of a body between them, but they had done it often enough now that Primo was used to it, and had memorized the routine.

At the base of the steps, the rotten roof blocking out the night sky, Primo lit the lantern, then Liliana began to dig. Next to them, the john lay face-up, still warm. He was in his 50s, with mutton chops and an expensive watch, and dead the usual way, from a single gunshot to the head.

Liliana was not ruthless—when Primo caught the flu from one of the girls, she called him honey, and made him her mother’s matzoh ball soup—but she was very efficient. She and Zeta knew every hotel maid and receptionist in Naples, which made targeting the johns easy. Liliana would wait, sometimes for hours, in private homes, hotel closets, and public parks, before emerging and dispatching the johns. Zeta intercepted the girls and got them to safety, and Primo picked up Liliana and the corpse, then continued to the john’s house, which they robbed. Most of the money went to the girls, setting up savings accounts for rent and food, and the rest went to paying off Zeta and Liliana’s contacts.

Then Liliana and Primo took a scenic drive up Mount Vesuvius, found a house like this one, and dug. This whole area was called la zona rossa del Vesuvio. The Vesuvius Red Zone. Sometimes, simply, the evacuation zone. The volcano had last erupted in March of 1944, lasting five days, and destroyed three surrounding villages. The eruption had occurred almost exactly in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Italy, and coincided, Primo thought, with his mother becoming an orphan. The timing felt fateful, like the earth itself was grieving.

Liliana climbed out the grave and handed Primo the shovel. He jumped down into it, and began to dig.

The first time they did this together, Primo had asked Liliana if she wanted to save anything from the corpse, his wallet, maybe, or his driver’s license. She had scoffed.

“You think we want to keep trophies?” she asked, smiling in disbelief at his question. “When Grace Kelly catches a mouse, I don’t leave the evidence on the mantlepiece.”

They took turns digging, and rested by the lantern’s flame, burning everything that wasn’t the body.

Liliana had grown up in Ottaviano, one of the villages destroyed by Vesuvius, and watched the eruption from Naples. She had spent most of the war hiding with her parents and little brother beneath the trick floorboards in what was now the bar’s food pantry. After the uprising and liberation of Naples in late 1943, she began to secretly venture out in the evenings, after most of the city had gone to sleep.

It was during this time that she taught herself how to break into houses, first out of necessity, because the bar owners had been killed in the uprising, and there was no food anymore, but then she began to focus on the homes of fascists and Nazi sympathizers. There was a certain pleasure, she said, in finding entry into places that were hostile to you.

It was only here, as they dug, that she told him about this. The worst night of the eruption, she only went as far as the bar’s rooftop—a skylight opened in the attic loft, which Primo slept beneath now—but it was enough to see the soot blot out the stars. Liliana had been 25, and sat up all night to watch the lava flow destroy her village. There was nothing she could do or change; she would never go home again. The next day, she couldn't stop coughing, and the streets of Naples were hidden beneath a meter of ash.

“‘You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back,’” Primo quoted, and crawled out of the grave. He had read and reread _Giovanni’s Room_ enough that he could see whole pages with his eyes closed.

“‘Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition,’” Liliana returned, cocking her head at him. Unsmiling, her face turned owl-like, an effect exaggerated by her pointed chin and wide, dark eyes. She was in the process of burning the photographs in the john’s wallet, flames licking over the faces of his children. She dropped the last corner of the photograph into the fire, then switched with Primo.

“I liked what you said before,” he told her, starting on the john’s receipts, “about finding ways into places that hate you.”

“You miss my point,” she said, glancing up at him. “You don’t always have to be hated. There are places of shelter, too, and more people like us than you can imagine.”

He didn’t know if she meant homosexuals or Jews or murderers. Maybe she meant all three at once. No one had ever put it to him like that before, not having to always be hated. For a long time, maybe his whole life, he had expected only hatred, and acted to ensure that outcome. Salvatore would always hate him, and he was glad of it.

Beyond the lantern’s light, the basement was flooded with thick shadow. Liliana, in the grave, dipped in and out of blackness as she dug, as if submerged by waves.

The receipts burned rapidly. Leo didn’t hate him. Regina, somehow, only disliked him. On the night that Leo mentioned in his letter, Primo’s father had been dead a week. Salvatore had discovered Primo crying, out of shock more than anything else, and hit him in the face with a brass table lamp.

Salvatore did it coldly, like punishing a disobedient animal. As Primo stared at him in silence, Salvatore said, “Don’t be so hysterical.”

Primo went to Leo and Regina’s house with his left eye swollen shut, so furious he couldn't even speak at first, but then Regina insisted something was missing from the sauce. She handed him and Leo spoons, and made them try it at least six times each. Leo took thoughtful spoonfuls, closing his eyes as he tasted and offering suggestions, so Primo did the same.

Primo fell asleep on their sofa that night, and woke up to them arguing behind their closed bedroom door.

“I don’t want him going back to that house,” Leo said. “Salvatore doesn’t know how to take care of him.”

“And you do?” Regina asked. “What, are we supposed to just keep him here and expect Salvatore to be fine with that? Are you stupid? He’d kill us.”

“I saw what Filippo did to Tjaša after they married,” Leo said. “He destroyed her. I won’t watch Salvatore do that to Primo. I can’t.”

Regina said something very quiet that Primo couldn’t hear, but there was a sharp edge to her voice.

“Like a brother,” Leo pleaded. “Regina, like a brother. Don’t say—you don’t know what you’re—I love you,” he said. “I married you.”

“I know you love me,” Regina said. “It’s just that I want to survive. If you bring Salvatore down on our heads, you’ll ruin us. Not just you, but me too. I love you, but I won’t. I refuse.”

“We should get back,” Liliana said, clapping the dirt from her hands. Together they raked the last shovelful over the corpse, and the light shrunk as the lantern burned low. “I need to marinate artichokes for tonight’s dinner.”

Greta and Teodora were folding paper airplanes and feeding Grace Kelly little bits of cheese on the bar’s doorstep when Liliana and Primo returned. Greta hugged them both around the middle, and Teodora gave one of her sardonic bows, as Liliana laughed and herded them and the cat inside.

Then she said over her shoulder to Primo, “Walk around the block and make sure they haven’t been seen.”

“What if they have?” he asked.

“Then go scare the shit out of someone,” she said, and bent to scoop up the nearest paper airplanes. “I’ll have breakfast ready when you’re done.”

She shut the door on him. The sun rose in peach tones, glossing the windows of the fishmonger across the street in yellows and pinks. A breeze rose off the sea and skimmed the remaining airplanes low and graceful over the street like white birds. He was tired. His fingernails were black with grave dirt. He chased the airplanes.


	6. Chapter 6

“My father did this for me when I was your age,” Salvatore said, grinning, and turned the car radio on.

It was early evening on the day of Primo’s 18th birthday, and Salvatore had been driving along the coast for the last ninety minutes. In the fading sunlight, the mountains and the sea were the same shade of blue, and the water was filled with floating bathers, scattered across the waves like bright beads. Before they left home, Salvatore had told Primo to shower.

Primo’s aunt cut up a watermelon after dinner, ripe from the garden, and wouldn’t meet Primo’s eyes when he asked to help. Instead, she made a face, like she was trying to smile but couldn’t, sliced another wedge almost viciously, then poured him and Salvatore more wine.

“It’s fine,” she said, but it sounded like she wanted to say, Get away from me.

Salvatore relaxed the farther away they got from their village, rolling the window down and unbuttoning his shirt, which billowed in the summer breeze. Salvatore was still drunk from dinner, and occasionally the car veered left or right, almost lazily threatening the oncoming traffic. Drivers blared their horns.

Every time the car drifted toward the other lane, Primo thought, Please. Please let him kill us both.

He wasn’t stupid; he knew where Salvatore was taking him. He had lied before when Salvatore asked if he was still a virgin, told him no, and made up a few stories about some of the local girls. It was unclear if Salvatore believed him, but Salvatore was easier to lie to than most, because almost no one did. They were too afraid of the consequences if they got caught.

Primo lied to him all the time. About the girls, and how shaking down the village butcher was a good idea, and that, no, he didn’t think his aunt knew they were going to a brothel.

But of course she knew. She wasn’t stupid, either, despite what Salvatore seemed to think. Power had a way of making people dumb. Too much of it, and they starting thinking they knew everything about everyone around them, and grew irate when they were proven wrong.

“Filippo showed me this place,” Salvatore said, speaking around the cigarette in his mouth. A chain of ash fell, and he brushed it away. “Said it had the best whores in all of Italy. Women with mouths like you wouldn’t fucking believe.”

The car swerved, was met with more honking.

Primo’s hand itched to take the steering wheel and jerk into the other lane. I want to kill you, he thought, and the words rang in his mind. I want to scare you like you scare me but make it worse and permanent. I want you to die, knowing that it was me who did it to you.

“You just have to look at them, and they bend right over,” Salvatore said. “They’re young, too, like you. You’ll like them.”

The last part was a command. Primo looked out the window and watched the sea go dark. When he told Leo about Salvatore’s birthday present, it had been gratifying to see Leo’s shoulders stiffen with disgust.

Leo didn’t say something like, “You don’t have to do this,” because of course Primo had to. There was no world in which he could tell Salvatore no.

Instead, what Leo said was, “Come and see me afterward. Make up an excuse and go out and I’ll find you. We’ll, I don’t know, we’ll go see a movie if you’d like. Take a walk, maybe. Talk. I’ll help you not think about it.”

Sometimes Primo was sure Leo knew. Salvatore definitely didn’t. I’m gay, he thought. The bathers swam inland, going home for the night. I’m gay, and one day I’ll kill you.

The brothel was a tall, white-walled fortress of a building, with small windows and an orange roof. It was dead inside except for a receptionist behind a desk, who stood and greeted Salvatore by name. It seemed he was a regular.

Outside the bedroom door, Salvatore clapped Primo on the back, hard enough that it echoed, then followed the receptionist down the hallway, and around the corner, to meet a different prostitute.

Salvatore’s handprint throbbed, feeling red. Primo wanted, more than anything, to leave. Failing that, he wanted to throw up.

He opened the door. On the bed sat a girl, maybe 16, who looked like she was playing dress-up in her mother’s lingerie. A sheet of blond hair fell over her shoulder, and she had broken out along her jawline. She had been reading when he came in, her finger still tucked between the pages of _Doctor Zhivago_.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Lara,” she said, who was a character in the novel; he had borrowed Regina’s copy to read when it first came out. “What’s yours?”

“Salvatore,” he said, and was immediately repulsed by his answer. “Primo,” he revised. He didn’t know why he told her the truth, especially when she had already lied to him. “It’s good,” he said, nodding at the book.

“You haven’t done this before, have you?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything.

She moved over, and he sat on the bed next to her, and looked down at his hands, which were knotted together on his knees. He could feel the weight of her gaze on him.

“You don’t want to fuck me,” she said, like she was trying to convince herself, or him. “Right?”

Her question came out small, and so full of hope that it filled him with shame. He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, because apologizing was all he could think to do.

“Your uncle paid for a full night,” she said. “I was told to, ah, brace myself. That you were going to jump me as soon as you came in. But, looking at you now, I think that’s all bullshit, isn’t it? You don’t want to at all.”

“What,” he said, “and you do? You want me to act like that?”

“No,” she said. “Only I was reading when you came in.”

“So read already,” he said, irritated. “Do you have another book?”

She didn’t. He sat, fully clothed, next to her and read over her tense shoulder. She read quickly, faster than him, and he made it only halfway down most pages before she turned them.

“Why Lara?” he asked.

The question made her jump. “What?”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Of all the characters in the book, Lara. She only almost survives, but then dies in a gulag right before the end.”

She frowned at him. “You don’t know that,” she said.

“I do,” he said, impatient. “I’ve already read this.”

“No,” she said. “Lara only disappears. They think she’s dead in a gulag, but they don’t know for sure. She’s just gone. She could be anywhere.”

“She leaves behind her daughter, though,” he said.

“Lots of people do,” she said, and shut the book. “How do you think I got here?”

//

The next morning, he went to see Leo, and they set off to walk through the mountains, where the air and ground went sheer and clear-sharp, and rocks and scrub rolled under their feet. It was a steep climb upward, but it felt good to be so far away from everyone else, just the two of them, Primo’s legs burning as he added more distance.

The sun had risen an hour ago, but wasn’t yet overhead. Leo wore a short-sleeved shirt, perspiration gleaming on his face and arms. This morning, Leo had answered the knock on his door, found Primo waiting on his doorstep, and amazed Primo by hugging him.

“I’m sorry,” he said into Primo’s neck, his arms tightening. “I’m so sorry he made you do that.”

No one had held Primo like this since his mother’s funeral three years ago. He could smell Leo’s cologne, and feel the thrilling, familiar shape of his body, his soft stomach, the muscles in his arms. Primo closed his eyes, leaned into him. He wanted to memorize the feeling of being so close to Leo that he could feel him breathe.

When Leo let him go, Primo told him what had actually happened—how he had spent most of the night reading _Doctor Zhivago_ , then fell asleep on the floor by Lara’s bed—and Leo laughed until tears came to his eyes. He looked relieved, or maybe even thankful, although for what, Primo didn’t know.

“You’re good, you know that?” Leo said. “You were left alone so much, but you turned out good.”

“There’s still time for me not to be,” Primo replied, but only because the way Leo looked at him, deliberate and tenderly, was overwhelming.

He stepped forward, back into Leo’s space, and Leo’s arms came around him again. He had been taller than Leo for a few years now, and over his head could see through the open door into Leo’s darkened house, where Regina still slept. What they were doing felt reckless, and he wanted more of it. At Primo’s back, the village dreamed.

“I could still ruin everything,” he told Leo. “I could have done it last night, and hurt that girl. Salvatore would’ve been proud, if I had.”

“Stop it,” Leo said. “He didn’t raise you, and he doesn’t own you. And I don’t give a shit about how he wants you to be. You’re good, deep-down good, and that won’t change. Now come on, we’re celebrating your birthday. Let’s go for a walk.”

When the land around them settled into even terrain, Leo opened his rucksack and spread out breakfast, bread, sheep’s milk cheese, and strawberry-tree honey, along with a thermos of coffee.

They ate, sweating from exertion and the deepening heat of the day. The clouds split the sun into rays, which caught the honey, and turned it jewel-like. It was Primo’s favorite kind, dark, rich, and bitter, and hard to find in Calabria. It made him feel exposed, that Leo knew such a small thing about him, and had gone out of his way to get it.

They sat between a nearby cliff and a grove of bergamot trees, which perfumed the air, bright and citrus. Over the cliff, their village shone in perfect miniature along the silver river.

“What do you think about, when you’re with Regina?” Primo asked. He poured himself some coffee, and took a sip. There was the ideal amount of milk in it.

Leo blushed at the question, which was fascinating. “I don’t know,” he said. “What her hair looks like, falling over the pillow. What she feels like, and how I make her feel.”

He accepted the cup of coffee Primo handed him and drank, gazing down at their village below. Gray had begun to strand through his hair. It caught the sunlight and glinted.

Primo had known Leo his entire life. Once, when he was very young, he had been stung on the back of the hand by a wasp, and had run inside, screaming. Leo, only a teenager then, found him, cut an onion in half, and pressed it cut-side-down to the sting. He held the onion to Primo’s hand for a pristine twenty minutes, brow furrowed, and listened to Primo tell him in great detail about several of his favorite airplanes.

By the time Primo realized he was in love with Leo, Leo had already been married for years. Primo, all of 13 years old then, had danced with Regina at their wedding.

Leo had forgotten silverware, so they ate with their hands. Primo drizzled honey onto his bread, and a sticky thread fell over the rim of the jar. He wiped it away, and licked the sweetness off his thumb.

“What do you think about?” Leo asked.

“You,” Primo said.

The answer hung in the air between them, seeming to vibrate. Leo stared at him, wide-eyed. Primo kept himself perfectly still, or was unable to move. In the back of his mind, he wondered if Leo was about to throw him off the cliff.

“Primo,” Leo said. “Look at me.”

Their eyes met, and heat flooded through him.

“I’m kidding,” Primo said. He wasn’t. Every single day he thought about what it would be like, to have him. To kiss Leo, to bite his lower lip, the tendons in his neck, his shoulders. The sounds Leo might make, the taste of him, if Primo took him in his mouth. The heat and weight of Leo as Primo let him into his body.

“What you’re saying,” Leo said carefully, “who your family is, you have no idea how dangerous a joke like that could be.”

“I know exactly how dangerous it is,” Primo said, and sneezed twice. “They mutilated Domenico. They blinded him. Come on,” he said and got up, “I want to keep walking.”

“Primo, wait,” said Leo. “Listen to me for one fucking second.”

Primo stood, heart pounding, and studied the bergamot trees, heavy with yellow-green fruit. He listened to the sounds of Leo collecting what was left of their breakfast and putting it away.

“What I said before, about not caring who Salvatore wants you to be,” Leo said. “That was true, all of it. But I also want you to be alive.”

Primo turned around. Leo was young, lean, and sun-brown, worry all across his face. What was it like, to be married to him? To wake up in the middle of the night, reach across the bed, and find him, warm with sleep? To make love to him, and kiss his back. To eat breakfast together every day, and wear a ring.

It would be the opposite of solitude, Primo thought. He would never know what that was like. It didn’t seem fair.

Leo shouldered his rucksack, and walked over to Primo, looked at him sidelong. “I brought wine,” he said. “I thought we could climb up the peak and drink it. If we go high enough, we’ll be able see all the way out to the sea.”

Many times over the course of Primo’s life he had tried to make Leo hate him, but Leo refused every single time. Primo didn’t understand why.

He sneezed again. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s the coffee.”

“I know,” Leo said. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr @ signsandcymbals


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